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Java Gets New Garbage Collector, But Only If You Buy Support
An anonymous reader writes "The monetization of Java has begun. Sun released the Java 1.6.0_14 JDK and JRE today which include a cool new garbage collector called G1. There is just one catch. Even though it is included in the distribution, the release notes state 'Although G1 is available for use in this release, note that production use of G1 is only permitted where a Java support contract has been purchased.' So the Oracle touch is already taking effect. Will OpenJDK be doomed to a feature-castrated backwater while all the good stuff goes into the new Java SE for Business commercial version?"
As a non-programmer, can someone give a brief explanation of what a garbage collector is as it pertains to programming.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
JRockit has all kinds of monitoring features, memory profilers, and other useful metrics built into the JRE, but you need a license key to unlock them. Core Java was always free. You pay for the value-added stuff.
"Will OpenJDK be doomed to a feature-castrated backwater while all the good stuff goes into the new Java SE for Business commercial version?""
Perhaps. But now that its GPL, maybe IBM, RH and the rest of Java's stakeholders will get onto making openjdk better than oracle's. Ill sure contribute: this is a strategic need for the foss movement.
NO SIG
Methinks they just want to make damn sure nobody uses this feature in a production environment. This is more of a sneak peek for paying customers who are contractually bound against using this in a production environment.
If this was included in the standard distribution, then people would use it no matter what the documentation said. And then Sun would be saddled with bug reports and whining.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
java was cool when it was a great idea, then it was implemented. it has never really been all that cool since then.
Blazing Spiders
As per release notes, this is an experimental feature. It may be that Sun intends to provide it only to paid customers or it may be that they want to make sure you don't use it in "production" environment until it's ready and then whine that Java is buggy if it doesn't work 100%.
I don't know which is true but the second possibility seems far more likely to me, making this story completely pointless and unfair - but hey this is slashdot.
Btw, off topic but is it just me or the subjects in replies are showing up as white text on white bg in Firefox but look ok in IE. I even tried in on another pc and same thing.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
1. Distribute working but unlicensed software
2. Encourage developers to use the software
3. Audit companies using said software
4. Profit!
We've gone through more than one episode that starts with: "shite -- we have to rip out this proprietary Oracle crap or pay another X (usually 6+ figures) per year in licensing fees.
The more devious method Oracle also uses is:
1. Package licensed software components into specific products
2. Change products, moving commonly used components into rarely licensed products
3. Notify customers right before negotiating new license
4. Profit!
The slashdot summary seems to me to have a heavy dose of sensationalism.
Oracle's implementation of java is GPL'd. What more do we want from them?
I doubt that there's been any recent research that's uncovered some fantastic new mechanism for garbage collection that was never known before. Garbage collection used to suck, and that was one of the problems, historically, with LISP. Over the decades, garbage collection has gradually gotten better. All the improvements in garbage collection are in the public domain. Gc is not generally a performance bottleneck for modern garbage-collected languages.
It would be slightly more worrisome if this new gc algorithm was patented -- but I haven't seen any evidence that it is. If it's not, then nothing is preventing anyone from making a fully GPL'd version of java with the new algorithm. If it was patented, then this would be a problem for all garbage-collected languages with open-source implemtations, not just java.
Does java's performance really depend much on the efficiency of its gc? My main complaint about java's performance is that the VM and libraries take too long to load.
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If you're a sole programmer writing everything yourself, I'd be inclined to agree with you. Most work I see, however, involves significantly larger chunks than 40,000 LOC and coordination with other teams or contributors. C/C++ has no inherent unified memory management scheme, and so the patterns and responsibilities for memory management can vary widely between teams, libraries, or chunks of code. That is something that often gets overlooked when discussing Java memory management. Java GC has literally has made the coordination and use of library code very simple.
Despite the humor, you make an interesting point. Had garbage collectors been invented in the 21st century, they might have been called "memory recyclers" rather than "garbage collectors". Primarily because the GC is actually reclaiming memory for reuse. Yet when the term "garbage collection" was coined, the concept of recycling hadn't yet entered common thinking. Ergo, it was identified with "taking out the trash" rather than "recycling something useful".
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Java got a bad rap back in the day when the language was poised to take over the desktop and then everyone used it, and were killed by its abysmal performance. Back in the 2000, I cursed java every week as I entered my development time into this crap-ola windows box that performed like a fat man running through a river of melted taffy. Loading an applet was a painful flow breaking experience that usually did nothing to a page. When people think of java, they think of this time. it's the slashdot two minute hate.
These days, Java works well both on the desktop and on the server. Shocking, I know. I'm currently developing a desktop app for OS X and people have no idea it's a java project. It looks and behaves as if written in Objective C. Our engineering team just wrote a server app in java that had over three million entries. At one point, it was creating nine hundred entries per second without breaking a sweat. But people don't see that. They just have mental images of all the crappy applets back in the days of yore, then make uninformed opinions about the current state of the language.
My biggest complaints about java are the inconsistent implementations between platforms so something might work great on a mac, but throws exceptions on windows. Write once, run everywhere is a lie. My code is 100% java (no native code) that runs perfect in both mac and windows, yet makes the official Linux JVM puke. I hate the fact the language is object orientated, but objects are expensive to create. I hate the fact that Swing makes it easy for good java developers to write terrible user interfaces. The GridBag layout was designed by a very bitter programmer. I hate the fact that java eats and eats all the memory it can find like a kid diving his face into birthday cake. People say there's no memory leaks in Java, but once you start playing with JOptionPane, you realize that's a nice little lie. And there is work in managing your objects. I can make an app bloat up like firefox in no time. There's a few other nitpicks, but speed has never been one of them. If it were, I would be writing my app in C++ with QT, or Objective C.
I don't know about Java, but I've been playing with Google's V8 and that sucker is fast, at least on Windows.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
.
Sounds like any other typical OSS business model from Ubuntu, Novell, RedHat, IBM, and even Microsoft.